Sometimes you don't realize how acclimated you've become to technology until you experience it in an odd fashion.
The other night I was flipping though the channels and hit upon the movie Mystic Pizza. I've seen it before. It's really not worth watching and I knew that when I hit on it.
For those who haven't seen it, don't bother. A synopsis of the plot, or rather plots, is as follows, as it plays into what I've noted here as the theme of this entry. The movie follows the lives and loves of three young Portuguese American women, who all work at a pizza restaurant in the Connecticut seaport town of Mystic. They characters are Kat Araujo, played by Annabeth Gish (no relationship to the great silent screen star Lillian Gish), Daisy Araujo, played by the then up and coming Julia Roberts and Jojo Barbosa, played by the Lili Taylor.
Note that none of the actresses are Portuguese Americans.*
Anyhow, the basic gist of the film is that Kat and Daisy are sisters, and Kat is bound in the near future for Yale, while Daisy is wild and not bound for Yale. Jojo is tied up in romance with a Portuguese American fisherman and the film starts off with their wedding, which is interrupted for most of the film when she collapses during the ceremony, burdened with the thought of the seriousness of the obligation she's embarking upon.
None of which has all that much to do with what I'm noting, but two parts of the plot do, and they both involve telephones.
Daisy has met a "preppy" (this 1988 film was made during the preppy era) who is a failed law student. His booting out from law school hasn't interrupted his wealth somehow, to we have the Townie/Preppy romance thing going on, a theme that dates back in various ways to the silent film era. Kat is not only working at Mystic Pizza, but is also baby sitting the daughter of a young architect whose wife is off in England. Yeah, you can probably see how all these plots develop from there.
Anyhow, in once scene the Daisy character is supposed to go to dinner with Preppy dude and meet his parents, but Kat, who is supposed to fill in for her at the pizza joint, doesn't show up. Daisy tries to call her but the handset has been kicked off the phone at the Architect's house where Architect, daughter and Kat are watching television.
That struck me there simply because now you'd call on your cell. If nobody answered you'd text.
It didn't disrupt me watching the film, and indeed I didn't have much invested in it anyhow, but that just struck me.
More significantly, however, late in the movie Architect and Kat arrange to go to a giant 18th Century house he is working on Halloween night as the house is reputedly haunted. Note, I didn't say this movie was good. While there, the predictable happens. Jojo, meanwhile, has agreed to participate in this evil by watching daughter, whereupon she discovers her love for children in a weakly developed part of the film which in turn will lead to the resumption of her nuptials. Anyhow, just like a silent film, Wife returns from England and Jojo is forced into making up a strained lie as to the missing husband and babysitter.
At that point, automatically, a modern viewer will think, as this takes place in world not all that long ago and otherwise pretty much like ours, "why doesn't she call Kat on her cell phone or text?". It's literally impossible not to. Of course, she can't. They didn't exist.
That's actually my sole point in noting this movie watching experience. I'm now so used to cell phones that my first reaction is "why doesn't she use her cell phone?", and the thought keeps repeating as you are watching these scenes.
Okay, while on this, why did I watch this, again?
I don't really know. I know that the first time I watched this movie on television it was a few years after its release as a fellow who was in law school at the same time I was, and who was from a somewhat well heeled family in Connecticut, took enormous offense to the movie at the time it was released. I recall him asking me if I'd seen it one day at law school. I didn't watch very many movies while in law school (maybe none) and I'd never heard of it. I recall his view was that the movie maker, whom he knew, knew nothing about Portuguese Americans in Connecticut. At the time, and upon the first viewing, I was pretty surprised that he'd be so wrapped up in that as he certainly wasn't a Connecticut Portuguese American either.
None of that justifies watching this film again, but there was nothing on and I was on the verge of falling asleep so I just left it on. Having seen it now, I think I agree with the critic noted. Everything, including the Portuguese nature of the protagonist, is pretty underdeveloped. You only know that they're Portuguese as somebody says something about it now and then and their being Catholic is mentioned a couple of times and oddly inserted a couple of times.
FWIW, there really is a Mystic Pizza. Most of the people who have seen this film apparently like it, as opposed to me, who does not, and following the film, the real Mystic Pizza was redone to look like the one in the move, which provides an odd example of art following life following art, I guess.
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